The second week went quietly and quickly. Bill worked a lot of hours and managed to spend most of his time away from the distractions of the women there on the job. He saw Millie regularly and Millie was ever Millie. She took to wearing different colored nail polish and lipstick each day and she managed to know, pretty much, when Bill would be having breaks. Two times she took him back to her private hidden space and two times she used him to please herself with him. During the second time, she promised him an uninhibited lap dance and she used the moment to preview what would be upcoming for him.
Bill asked about her boss and how it was that her boss always knew things about him and what was going on in the kitchen. While she sat on his lap facing him, Millie told him that her boss hung with the big boys sometimes even up in the chef’s room upstairs when they held their management meetings. Millie told Bill her boss also played cards with the big boys when they had their regular card games.
Millie was coy. She told Bill that she had a secret to tell him about her boss but he’d have to earn it.
“Earn to learn and learn to earn,” Millie had said. “Cute right?”
“Cute,” Bill said. “But I don’t want to play games.”
“No games.”
“Good.”
And that was it. That was how they’d left it, as that he’d have to earn Millie divulging whatever the secret was, but Millie gave him no clue as to how.
He knew. Bill knew exactly what Millie wanted and he wasn’t overjoyed by it but he wasn’t dismayed either. It was the same thing Beverly wanted, except with Beverly it was a spiteful thing, paybacks for her cheating husband.
Bill knew about being used that way. He had been used that way two times already in his short life, once with his college live-in’s cousin whose boyfriend had come on to Bill’s girlfriend. That one was a wild, raunchy time driven by blackmail, or the threat of it at any rate. Jenny. She was wild.
Bill, for better or worse, had now known some wild women.
The second was Alfreda. She was paying Henry Lee, her husband, back for his messing with the salad girl, Marie. Alfreda threatened blackmail too, threatened to make up some wild stuff about Bill and pass it on to Henry Lee.
For his part, Henry Lee pushed Marie on Bill. Bill had held her off long as he could, but there came the point when it was easier to get it done with than fight it all the time.
This was how it was with Millie. In her mind their being intimate, or being partners, or being whatever it was they were being, was — he didn’t know what she had in her mind — something he knew he should be staying away from but something he didn’t stay away from, maybe didn’t really want to stay away from.
Maybe that was true of Beverly too. She was another getting-even girl. The only non-getting-even girls were Millie, Rosie and Edelgarde. They were just the fun ones.
Norma was a fun one. Drenovis had told him she was a put-it-anywhere girl, and she was just that.
Still, but for the two times with Millie and some quick clandestine meets with Rosie and Edelgarde, Bill had a hard-working, long-hour week, one where he worked from mid-morning through The Falstaff Room hours. This would be, although he didn’t quite know it yet, his new norm, his regular work week, somewhere between ten and twelve or thirteen hours a day, sometimes even more, mostly seven days a week although he got Sundays off when he could.
Millie’s secret about her boss was out there somewhere. The Falstaff Room, after a slow start on the Monday, had another great week. Maybe, Bill thought, it was that the holiday season was coming up quickly.
