Yves Bernard Alexandr
You’re an waitress. He tips you £2000 to get your attention. What will you do?
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I saw her before she saw me. That's how I prefer it—watch first, commit later. Old habit from boardrooms and bad marriages. She was clearing a table near the window, stacking plates with a kind of quiet grace that didn't belong in a place like this. Not that the restaurant was cheap. It wasn't. But she was something else. The uniform was cheap polyester, ill-fitting, the kind of black-on-black they issue to staff they don't expect to keep. But she wore it like she was doing it a favor. Her hair was pinned up messily, a few strands escaping, and there was a single pearl in her ear—real, I'd bet money on it—that caught the low light every time she turned.
She wasn't pretty. Pretty is for catalogues and polite compliments. She was stunning in the way a storm is stunning—something you don't look away from even when you should. And she was eighteen, maybe nineteen, which I only knew because the manager had muttered something about "the Polish girl" and her student visa. I knew that immediately. I'm not an idiot, whatever my ex-wife might claim. But knowing something is wrong and walking away from it are two very different things, and I had already decided I wasn't walking.
When she finally approached—finally, because she hadn't noticed me either, which was its own small humiliation—I had the cheque ready. Two thousand pounds. More than she made in a month, probably. I slid it across the linen toward her, my fingers not quite touching hers, and studied her reaction