Discipline (11 page)

But suddenly, she burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, covering her
mouth. But it was too late — everyone else in the kitchen was
clutching their stomachs and wheezing at Ben’s flustered face,
which matched quite well with the seeming accident soaking his
pants. Jenn cleared her throat, though a titter of amusement
remained in her voice as she spoke to him. “I assure you that I’ll
get to the bottom of this incident and that everyone involved will
be properly disciplined. In the meantime, sir, I’m going to have to
ask you return to your table since guests aren’t technically
allowed in the kitchen.”

Ben gaped at her for what felt like a full
minute. Finally, he jabbed a finger at Adriana. “I’m saying this
for the good of your restaurant, but this girl needs to be
terminated. Immediately.”

Jenn nodded. “I assure you that this will be
her last shift here.”

Running a claw-like hand through his hair,
Ben exhaled and nodded, seeming to calm at this news until Adriana
leaned over to whisper loudly at him.

“‘Cause I’m covering for a friend tonight. I
don’t actually work here anymore, assclown.”

Silence fell over the kitchen.

And with
assclown
, suddenly, the ball
of rage and anxiety in the pit of my stomach unraveled — into a
mess of delirious, bubbling, uncontrollable giggles. I couldn’t
stop. My eyes were shut and squeezing out tears, but I could hear
Jenn among those laughing with me.
Oh my God, we’ve all lost our
minds
. For a second, Ben was in my ear, snarling about how
Adriana was turning me. But soon enough he was gone, thanks to our
busboy who had gone and fetched the bouncer from the bar next door.
We didn’t have our own security staff, so he often lent us a
hand.

“Was that the crazy ex?” Jenn asked me ten
minutes later, or what felt like ten minutes later, though I wasn’t
sure how long it had really been. I nodded, coming down from my
giggles and recalling Ben’s face of utter rage and fury. Before
getting shown out, he’d said something about my mother and gotten
some sort of threat out about Daniel. But it didn’t matter anymore.
I’d planned on telling Mom about the breakup and Daniel no longer
wanted anything to do with me. So Ben had nothing on me. And I had
not a care in the world.

“Ade.”

She turned to me, her eyes still twinkling
from the laughter. I hooked my pinky with hers.

“I owe you a ton of drinks, girl. For that.”
My grin was sheepish, apologetic. “And the past three years.”

Her smile spread from ear to ear. “Guess we
should start tonight.”

CHAPTER
7

Letting go felt so damned good.

Despite relaxing since the breakup, I’d yet
to stay out past 11:30PM. Mom still called at least four times a
week between eleven and midnight, just as she had when I lived with
Ben in TriBeCa. She always asked for me to put the phone up to
Jack’s mouth so she could hear his “cute little bark,” but I knew
it was because she was keeping tabs on me. For Ben. Making sure
that I was home and being a good little wife. It wasn’t very subtle
considering she reminded me nightly to “take care of him,” which
included everything from giving his “tired muscles” a “good, deep
rub” after work to remembering that I should always “behave how Ben
would see fit.” Because staying out late with single girlfriends
was not only a show of disrespect, according to Mom, but a risk for
temptation.

“Not that you should ever be tempted by
another when you have a beautiful gem like Ben,” she always said as
I quietly pretended to retch on the other end of the phone, solely
for my own entertainment. It helped with my need to cringe, which
was plentiful whenever Mom called to talk. I absolutely dreaded our
conversations.

Though tonight, I answered her call with
great enthusiasm.

Mostly because I was tipsy. It was midnight
but just like yesterday, I was still out and drinking at Todos
Santos. Last night, we had lined up shot after shot to congratulate
ourselves for collectively ridding of Ben. Tonight, our reason was
for celebratory purposes because Adriana had announced her decision
to return to the staff while I’d announced my decision to stay —
not that anyone had known of my plans to leave.

Not that anyone really needed a legitimate
reason to drink, anyway.

“Body shots!” Harry hollered just as I
answered my phone.

“
What
is going on, Nina?”

Mom’s question came before I could even say
“hello,” and only then did I realize that I’d already missed a few
of her calls.

“Hi, Mom. I’m still at work,” I said,
drawing absolutely everyone’s attention by saying the word “Mom.”
Suddenly, it was the entire staff’s mission to shout the most
inappropriate things they could think of, just for the
entertainment of my mother.

“Aw, fuck yeah, that feels good!” Harry
yelled into my phone as I gasped, suppressing laughter while
kicking him away from my seat on the bar top.

“Oh God, it’s too big!” Adriana
squealed.

There was absolute horror in Mom’s voice.
“
Who
was that, Nina? Where in the hell are you? Tell me
now!”

“Mom, I’m at work!” I answered, trying not
to snort as Marco stood behind Harry, pretending to spank him.

“I can hear the
drunks
around you,
Nina! For the love of God, go home before you stoop right to their
level!” Mom demanded, the panic in her voice more fitting for a 911
call. “Better yet, quit. I mean it, Nina. I can feel you turning
into one of them!” She paused for a moment and I could practically
hear her thinking hard. “Nina. I’ll supplement you some money every
month, okay? Daddy will find a way to help you out if the gallery
doesn’t pay enough. Or you know what? I can take less from your
allowance. How does that sound?”

I groaned. “I don’t want your money, Mom.
You guys are struggling enough.”

“Don’t
say
that!”

I blinked, startled. “But it’s true.”

“The spa will turn it around for us.
Everyone’s already talking about it. They’re very excited.”

My stomach churned as I felt myself about to
spill. “But… what if you can’t find the money for the spa?” I
asked, mouthing
thank you
to Adriana as she detected a
serious topic and hushed everyone, herding them to the other end of
the bar. “You can’t rely on Ben anymore, Mom. He and I broke
up.”

There. It was out.

I waited for her to say something. Since it
was silent on the other end, I continued. “We broke up more than a
month ago. He proposed and I said no so he kicked me out that night
and I’ve been living with Kelsey ever since. And I’m happier this
way, Mom. You don’t know what he was really like. I was depressed
with him.” The words were pouring out now, as if I’d opened a
floodgate. “I stayed with him for all the wrong reasons. I thought
we needed him. As a family. But I promise you, we don’t, Mom, so
please don’t worry. I’m going to take care of myself. But that
means staying at Todos instead of doing intern work at the gallery
because I make two hundred dollars every night and over three
hundred on weekends, sometimes four if we have a private party. I
can save extra for any kind of emergency, like when you guys have
trouble paying bills. Okay? Just please, please stop thinking about
Ben like he’s some savior for us because he’s not and I won’t let
him be. Everything he offers or gives is at a price. You just don’t
know it yet.”

It took a few seconds for me to hear
anything from the other end but finally, there was the sound of
Mom’s jagged breathing.

“You are
engaged
to him, Nina. That
ring. You can’t be broken up.”

God. I fought against the lump forming in my
throat.

“
Mom
. We are not engaged and you
wouldn’t want me to be with him if you knew what he’d put me
through.” I felt the lump rise and immediately, my feet walked me
away from the others and into the kitchen, in case there were
tears. “He never let me see my friends, Mom. He turned me against
anyone close to me because he knew they’d eventually tell me that
our relationship wasn’t normal. He treated me like he owned me. And
I was an idiot because I let him. I stayed home if I wasn’t with
him because he got upset if he didn’t know what I was doing. I did
whatever he wanted, how he wanted, when he wanted. I didn’t know
how else I should act because after awhile, I
did
feel
indebted to him. Everything I owned or knew belonged to him. I was
his property, Mom. You can’t possibly approve of that.”

Standing in the middle of the kitchen,
staring at the steel racks of sparkling, white dishes, I waited for
her response. For my dilemma to be officially over. I heard her
sigh on the other end, which for some reason helped my shoulders
relax.

But then I heard her words.

“You need to think this over, Nina. You made
a big mistake.”

And with that, she hung up.

~

By the time it was a little past 1AM, I was
flat out drunk.

I hadn’t planned on being hammered, but
after the phone call with Mom, I’d sucked down two straight
concoctions that Adriana had thrown together, both of which were
more tequila than anything else. Then, for refusing to let Harry do
a body shot off my stomach, I faced a penalty improvised by Adriana
— two shots and a dance solo on the bar top, for which she played
old school Destiny’s Child. To turn the punishment around on her, I
proceeded to dance like a circus clown, doing a silly, borderline
creepy little jig while flailing my arms about. Harry called it the
hands down sexiest thing he’d ever witnessed.

By 2AM, despite the fact that none of us
could walk in straight lines, we were on the rooftop of the bar
next door. The city lights were a colorful blur of lines in my
vision, probably because my head kept swaying from side to
side.

And I was somehow shoeless, my Converse
sneakers nowhere in sight. The case was the same with Adriana, who
was nestled beside me as I sat against the side of the roof, both
of us watching as Harry and Marco engaged in some sort of bootleg
sumo wrestling match, one of the line cooks serving as referee.

“So stupid,” Adriana giggled. “Boys are
dumb.”

“Agreed.”

She sighed and frowned. “So, are you going
to tell me what that last fight was about? What Ben asked you to
do?”

I’d updated her on everything at this point
except for that. With a bit of a groan, I rolled my neck and opened
my eyes to look up into the black of the sky. “He planned a
vacation for us and another couple. Dane from his firm and Dane’s
girlfriend, Tory. He’s one of Ben’s closest friends and they were
the couple that we always sat with at dinners and parties. I got
along with his girlfriend because I was the only other girlfriend
Dane let her hang out with and we always just laughed at how stupid
the guys would get. They were so insanely competitive with each
other. I swear they actually hated and wanted to kill each other
sometimes, especially when they bet on sports, which was always. I
couldn’t even watch baseball anymore because Ben ruined it for me
by turning into a psychopath if he lost money. Especially if he
lost and Dane won.”

Adriana rolled her eyes. “How much do people
even bet and win on these things?”

“There was a boxing match once that Dane put
fifty thousand dollars on.”

She shot up. “What the
hell
? I could
buy like, three cars with that! Or pay like, two years worth of
rent and utilities!”

“Yup. He won two hundred grand from that
bet.”

“I’m going to throw myself off of this roof
right now.”

“And he gave Ben weeks of shit for being too
much of a ‘pussy’ to put money on that one, so Ben’s response to
that was dropping more than forty grand on a hundred-and-three inch
LCD for the screening room, since he and Dane watched games in
there.”

“I’m sorry —
screening
room? His own
private screening room? You never told me about this.”

“Yeah… he used to call it the ‘movie
theater’ until he thought that ‘
screening room
’ was more
sophisticated because some big guy from work called it that. If I
ever slipped and said ‘movie theater’ in front of guests he’d give
me such a death look.”

“Jesus Christ, how did he
sit
in that
screening room with such a massive stick up his ass?”

“He’s spent most of his life with that
thing, I figure he’s gotten used to it.”

“Ha!” Adriana snorted, though she covered
her mouth when she noticed that I wasn’t laughing. It was still
hard to while on the topic. “I’m sorry, please continue. What
happened with the trip?

“I was all packed and Ben was all packed but
literally the night before we were set to leave, he told me he
wasn’t going. But that I should still go. That I
had
to
still go. And I said no but that wasn’t acceptable, so ten hours
before my flight, I had to prepare myself to go on a weeklong
vacation with this couple and be a third wheel, which I already
thought was bad. But then Ben told me that Tory wasn’t going
either. She didn’t even know about the trip.”

Adriana stopped braiding her hair. “Wait.
Just you and the guy? How would
Ben
of all people be cool
with that?”

I stared at nothing. “I think it was his way
of… proving ownership.”

“What… in the actual fuck?”

I closed my eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if
even Ben was amazed by how completely docile he got me. I stayed in
his apartment all day, I raised his dog, I learned to cook the
things he liked. I gave him massages whenever he wanted, sex,
blowjobs whenever he wanted. I let him tell me how to wear my hair,
my clothes, how to speak to him. I think… I know the thing with
Dane was him wanting to show off how well he’d… trained me.”