Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

here’s good, this is far enough. We’ll camp here for the night and make our ascent in the morning . But I didn’t, and on June eighth at the bar next door Mickey, one of the senior servers, pimped me out. He told me to go outside with his friend James, who didn’t work at The Restaurant and whom I’d never seen before. We got intomy car and James told me to suck his dick. What reluctance I felt at the sight of his slack penis flopped over on his thigh. (By that time the natives didn’t linger. They just slipped out the back of me quick and let the fire door slam.) When it got hard he wanted to fuck, so I got in the passenger seat underneath him. There were servers and kitchen guys in the parking lot drinking after work and I’m sure they all saw the car rocking. I was thinking it might be over soon when the passenger door opened and Mickey stood there, watching his friend fuck me. He got right down in my face and poured a Modelo Especial all over my head and neck. He said That’s right you like it you’re such a slut. He’s fucking you good isn’t he. I said Shut the door, Mickey, and wiped beer out of my eyes while James continued to fuck as if he were oblivious. Mickey slapped my cheek and said Shut up shut the fuck up. I said Okay and stared at him impassively. James fucked. Mickey opened the back door of the car so he could reach me better because the seat was reclined. He poured beer on me and hit my face and called me a bitch and hit my face, and I thought about her sleeping in her dad’s living room half an hour away. I wondered which pajamas she was wearing and if he had found her missing favorite stuffed fox yet. After James got out of me and out of the car I quit using drugs and started parking in front of the restaurant so that when my shift was over I wouldn’t have to walk past anyone who might offer me a beer, a drag, or a bump, or tell me they wanted their duck sicked.

    Yesterday Danny walked through the mother station—what we call the area in the back where we make tea andcoffee and prep bread baskets—singing Fuckin shiiiiiiiiit, fuckin shiiiiiiiiiit to the tune of the Rocky theme. He went into the employee bathroom, where he shaves every day before service while conferring with one or the other of his inner circle. When he came out he said, as he adjusted his tie, Fuckin suck my balls, bitches. I’m starvin.
    He strides lankily through the main dining room around five p.m. every day, half-dressed in his suit trousers and a Yankees T-shirt. He sees everything. He can tell if you’re chewing gum from all the way across the cavernous dining room, which we keep so dark we have to give the guests flashlights to read the menu. He hates it when you don’t make sure there’s enough room to work around your tables—at the height of dinner service sometimes you have only six inches of space between chair backs, and the path from the kitchen line to the farthest tables becomes labyrinthine if not unnavigable. Danny will walk past your five-top and say Sister-love, would you please scoot this fucker a cunt hair to the right so we don’t dump mac ’n’ cheese all over the fat-ass in seat two?
    Miguel Loera will be sending out the mac ’n’ cheese when dinner service starts, but right now he’s talking to one of the other servers about Chivas, the fútbol team favored and followed by most of our kitchen staff. Miguel runs the kitchen line for Chef. He is a magician, he never fucks up. He calls me Maestra, because I sometimes wear lentes that make me look bookish. I call him Miguelito or Maestro. He always leaves the second button on his chef’s coat unbuttoned, for luck. When I first see him in the afternoon as Iwalk past the kitchen I’ll catch his eye and pat my heart, where that button rests on his coat, in a gesture of solidarity. Yesterday he asked me if I had a good time with my family for Easter. Did you find eggs? he asked. You kid look for the little huevos? I said, Yes, we looked