About a week later, Nyssa was in the middle of mopping the parlor during the day, a few hours before any of the clients were due to arrive, when she heard Katrina’s voice pierce through the wall from somewhere out in the hallway. “You are a piece of fucking shit!” she screamed.
Nyssa paused in her mopping movements, looking around to see if any of the other girls waiting around in the parlor had heard the same thing she did. A few girls looked up in the vague direction of the scream’s origin, but a second later they turned back to their books or notebooks, resuming whatever task they were doing to distract themselves before work. Nyssa decided that she should just ignore the noise, too, and focus on her job. I’ve got to make this parlor totally spotless before Katrina walks back in here, she reminded herself, pushing her body harder to cover more ground with the mop.
“You’re such a sick asshole!” Katrina screamed again, louder this time, like she was closer to the parlor than before. Nyssa’s heart jumped up into her throat, her defenses going on alert in response to the sound of anger. Nyssa had enough experience with clients to know what people sounded like when they were considering violence. In this moment, judging from what she’d just said, Katrina fit the bill to a T.
“Oh, come off it, Ms. Moral High Ground,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “You act so high-and-mighty, marching around here, spending your daddy’s money…”
“Don’t you ever talk to me about my father, Sebastian! Ever!”
Nyssa placed the mop back in the bucket, balancing it against the wall before quickly crossing the room to talk to Kimmie. “Hey,” she whispered, gesturing toward the sounds on the other side of the wall. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, it’s just Sebastian,” Kimmie said, flipping through the pages of her magazine, not looking up to face Nyssa directly.
“Who’s that?”
“Katrina’s boyfriend.” Her eyes remained glued to the magazine even when a loud crashing sound rang out from somewhere in the hallway. “They fight like this at least once a week.”
“Wow,” Nyssa said, straining her ears to try to make out any more noises from the hallway. “Sounds brutal. Are they in the process of breaking up or what?”
“Nah,” Kimmie said, shaking her head. “He’s too important to the business, I’m pretty sure. He runs drugs for her father, so it’d be pretty awkward if they broke up.”
“Huh,” Nyssa said, walking back over to resume mopping the floor.
“You know what, go fuck yourself! Because you’re sure as hell not going to fuck me anytime soon!” Katrina screamed.
“Oh, what a fucking tragedy! Like I give a shit!” Sebastian yelled back, right before the heavy sound of a door slamming shut rang out through the air.
There was perfect silence for several long moments, but finally the door to the parlor swung open and Katrina stepped inside. “What are you all sitting around doing nothing for?” she barked at the girls gathered in the various seats in the center of the room. “Get to fucking work!”
The girls jumped to their feet at once, rushing around each other to grab cleaning supplies from the other side of the room, all suddenly committed to helping Nyssa transform the parlor into pristine condition. Meanwhile, Nyssa was distracted, unable to stop herself from continually looking over her shoulder to see what Katrina was doing. After a few moments where Katrina just muttered to herself under her breath, she watched her pull out a phone from her purse and dial a number, tapping her foot impatiently as it rang.
Nyssa didn’t know why she was so curious all of a sudden, but she brought the mop closer to Katrina, hoping to hear what she was fighting with her boyfriend about.
“Papa?” Katrina said into the phone a moment later. “Papa, you have to do something about Sebastian. I can’t deal with this anymore!”
Nyssa strained her ears as hard as she could, trying to pick up on the noise from the other end of the phone, but luckily Katrina’s phone volume was turned all the way up, so she could listen without appearing too conspicuously curious.
“What now?” an older male voice said. “You can’t be calling me every time you get into a little spat, Kat.”
“It’s not a fucking little spat, Papa!” Katrina shouted. “He’s a piece of shit, and I’m sick of him. You have to punish him, Papa. Like, right now.”
“Be careful ordering me around,” Katrina’s father said in a warning tone of voice. Nyssa looked across the room to meet eyes with Kimmie, whose expression informed that she was listening along to the phone conversation, too. “Remember who you are here.”
“You should remember who the fuck I am!” Katrina shouted back. “I’m your daughter, for Christ’s sake, and now this fucking loser is demanding that I let him fuck the girls whenever he wants! How can you just let him disrespect me like this?”
“Because he’s the biggest earner in the organization!” Katrina’s father yelled on the other end of the phone. “So what, he wants to fuck some other girls? You know how many women I’ve bedded, even before your mother died? It’s a part of the business. Get fucking used to it.”
All of the color drained from Katrina’s face, leaving her looking a little sick as she listened to her father’s tirade. “You’re forgetting what your role in all this is, Kat. You have to keep the earners happy. That includes Sebastian. Let him pick out a girl to fuck, and you’ll both be happier, believe me.”
“Papa…” Katrina said softly, her tone pleading. Despite herself, Nyssa felt a surge of sympathy shoot through her chest, just from looking at her boss’s sad face.
“You wanted to be a part of the business, remember?” her dad said sternly. “Well, congratulations, welcome to the family. All you’ve got to do is be professional and keep your mouth fucking shut. You should be more like your mother, you know. She always knew when to close her mouth and open her legs. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Take care of it, and stop bothering me with this bullshit.”
With that, Katrina’s father hung up on her. All the girls looked down to their feet at the same time, not wanting to make eye contact with Katrina after she was so thoroughly, publicly shamed by her father. Nyssa moved the mop back and forth over the same spot on the floor, too nervous to keep going and get even closer to Katrina. She berated herself for trying to overhear the conversation. Her stupid curiosity had gotten the better of her once again, and now she was right in the line of fire.
In the awkward silence that followed, all of the girls could hear Katrina’s heavy, labored breathing, her lungs working overtime like she’d just run ten miles. Don’t fucking look at her, Nyssa told herself, continuing to mop the same spot on the floor over and over again. Don’t fucking do it, idiot.
But she couldn’t stop herself, her eyes glancing up for a second to meet Katrina’s. Nyssa realized that she’d expected to see her eyes full of tears, but instead they were hard and mean, her piercing blue irises looking like two shards of impossibly sharp ice. Nyssa dropped her gaze right away, but the damage was done.
Katrina slowly walked over to Nyssa, stopping mere inches away from her. “What are you looking at?” she hissed in Nyssa’s face.
“Nothing. I’m not looking at anything,” Nyssa said quickly, moving her mop faster across the floor, wanting an excuse to step away from her boss.
But Katrina stepped in front of her, stopping Nyssa in her tracks. “You think you’re so gorgeous, don’t you?” she whispered, her eyes narrowed into thin slits.
Nyssa felt like her skin was crawling, all of her cells trying to escape Katrina’s penetrating gaze. But she held her head up high, swallowing her fear and meeting Katrina’s eyes head on. “I think all the girls in this room are,” she said, avoiding directly answering the question.
Katrina scoffed and reached forward to brush some of the hair back from Nyssa’s face, making Nyssa feel like her skin was on fire. “You’re a smart one,” Katrina said as she placed the strands of hair behind Nyssa’s ear. “Hold on to that, but don’t let everyone know. Smart girls sometimes meet stupid ends.”
With that, she turned and marched out of the parlor, slamming the door behind her so hard that everything in the room trembled for a second with the force of her anger.
Katrina was a hurricane of a woman, all storm wrapped up in deceptively elegant clothing. Nyssa made a mental note of that as she resumed mopping, trying to push all of her worries out of her mind. She didn’t mean anything by that, she said to herself. It wasn’t a veiled threat. She’s just upset. Everything will be fine. Absolutely everything is going to be perfectly okay.
But no matter how much she repeated that mantra to herself, she couldn’t quite force herself to believe it.