Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

He said Shh, he said I can’t get you any narcotics but I would like to make love to you. I don’t know if that would have any palliative effect but I would really like to. I said All right, but I’m having trouble controlling my face. He said that was fine, he laughed, he kissed me tenderly, his long hair fell over me. Clark was slender, he had a white man’s no-ass, not those two baby heads in a sack like Cal. He had a large thick straight penis and any time we did it he was in it all the way, studying it like a lepidopterist, admiring every intricate pattern up close with gravity and joy. His intensity pulled me down and down and down until I came and slept.

Cal would bring Max and Elena into the restaurant so they could all have dinner there once in a while, on special occasions like when he finished his cleansing. The cleansing was an annual thing, Christmas through April or something like that, and he cut out meat, cheese, alcohol, sugar, and weed. I teased him after he first delivered that list — And I know you’re still not getting any so what you got left for yourself my friend? — and he said Yes ma’am you have a point there but it’s about purification. And let me tell you how good that long bone cowboy tastes come April.

When he brought in the family I steered clear. Everybody else would go by the table to coo over his baby and be kind to the wife but I knew I couldn’t. Avoiding her had never been hard until one Valentine’s Day long after Cal’s summer with me. By then they’d made him a manager and I was seeing the hateful man, unhappily. I came into work later than everyone that day because Danny had asked me to pick up his suits and some razor blades on my way in, so I missed the introduction of Max in the shift meeting. Valentine’s Day meant twice as many covers, the dining room converted into a sea of deuces, people jammed into three square feet of space to wait forever for their steak and stare into each other’s eyes drumming up some juice for whatever came next. So they brought in some extra hands to run food and polish glasses, but I didn’t know Cal had conscripted Max until sometime around what would be the sixth or seventh second of a bull ride, time to hold on tight to that shift or give up, fall off. I had a station far from provisions so every time someone dropped a napkin or a spoon or needed more sauce, more ice, more butter, I was hauling myself to go get, go get, go get, but I was hanging on, that’s why Cal put me back there, because it would have been a disaster with some of the baby servers or fuckups in that station.

I had my hands full of some dishes I had cleared, and a bottle of wine and a check presenter tucked under one arm, when this lady at one of my tables asked if I could please get her some creamy horseradish. Certainly, I said, right away, attempting to hold the stack of dishes away from her but unable to do anything more than gesture at that without putting the gristly remains of a ribeye in the face of the large man at my other elbow. As I twisted, I saw a woman in a sort-of uniform behind me — the same white shirt and apron as me, without the vest and tie — so I assumed she was one of the add-ons they’d brought in for the night and before I took a good look at her face I asked her if she could take the plates please. Then I was looking into her pretty brown eyes and I knew from Cal’s wallet exactly who she was, and she was looking at me thinking she knew who I must be just from process of elimination — there weren’t that many girls who worked at The Restaurant — and from the kind of questions a wife asks a man about the other, in those moments when she’s thinking she can deal with it: What does she look like? Is she white? Trying to find out if she’s hot or young or has big tits. And the husband will answer with thin lips. He’s fucked so he’ll say things like Why you got to know all this, what’s it matter, instead of answering, and she’ll say things like I just want to know why I’m not enough for you.

Then he’ll sigh and say She has short hair and she could never give me what you do. There. Is that all?

In the dark dining room I guess she couldn’t see my face cook up to a warm red medium-rare, something a white girl can’t hide. Not that I regretted any second I’d spent with Cal. What I regretted was having just asked her to do me a favor when I hadn’t done her any, but there was no time to think about that if I was going to stay on the bull, no time to do anything but try to get that woman her creamy horseradish while she still had a bite or two of filet mignon to enjoy with it.

Men will toy with you, I don’t care how much they talk about a woman being a tease. Married men will. Single men rarely hesitate past a certain point. But married men will toy, treat you like you’re plastic, like whatever grip you have on whatever kind of heart you have is your business, like maybe you don’t even have anything that could be offended. I think that’s the same scared-boy coin though — single man on the one side taking what he can, married man on the other afraid to mess up what he took.

So I’d let Cal do what he would, I’d left him alone. What I wanted was his want and that’s not something you can force. But after I dropped off that sauce I went to put back the bottle of wine and he was at the POS there, sweating. Past four hundred covers and he’d be moving so fast and holding so much in his brain and taking so much shit from guests that his ochre forehead would start to run. A gentleman, he patted, with a folded linen that matched his suit. Think you’re hot! I said to him, Guess who I just met in the dining room? Fucking give a sister a tip, you know?

I wasn’t slowing down to hear his piece, just gliding behind him to put that pinot in its bin and get back out to my corner, but I’d picked the wrong place in his night to be tough, I was probably the latest of nineteen people to yell at him and I wasn’t in line to spend a couple bills on dinner so I didn’t merit any deference. I was just supposed to do my job and not cause trouble. Hey! he said, like he’d say to a dog that was in his bushes or a hood trying to steal his kid’s bike, that Hey! full of strange to cut me, You better get back here and pump that, I don’t care how busy you are!

That was how he knew to get to me, ignore what I said and go for my work, imply that I was lazy, that I didn’t have standards as good as his. I went back. I took the bottle out of the bin and put the white plastic pump on the rubber stopper and pumped the air out of it and said to him Cal, I swear to God you did not pump your wine on a night like this when you were a server and if you tell me you did I’m going back out there to find her and I’m going to tell her I sucked every drop out of you every day and I’m going to tell her I’m still doing it and you’re a fucking liar and I’ll explain to her that that’s because you fuck me and you lie to her.

He was quiet. Then What in hell is up with you? he said, aware that the situation suddenly required more than a power play. Nic walked up needing something from Cal then but Cal didn’t turn to him, and looked at me long as I walked away. Come talk to me later he said, putting some suspicion in there for a buffer but some respect too, to tempt me.

Once I did get one lick. I surprised him and I got there before he could block me. I got one lick on the underside of his big vitiligoed head and he pushed me away instantly, strongly, said The fuck you doing! just the way he’d said Hey! trying to squash me so I’d never do that again. Then seeing the look on my face, both the want and the apology, he’d said Mami, don’t do that. I’ll spill. As if to say If I promise I want you more than anything will you accept nothing.