Chapter 2 - Thank You For Smoking
The café is permanently shrouded in a thick smoky haze.
But it's never enough.
Back when it was my dream to run one such vibrant and energising locale, the idea of permitting smoking inside wouldn't have crossed my mind in a million years. But now, of course, this isn't my café anymore. I don't call the shots. And even if I did...
I now only dream of smoke.
I've put my entire life into this café, and by extension, giving it up to my former rival, my conqueror, feels like giving over my entire life to her. That is so forbidden and so hot.
Even more so when my reward is the silent drifting of the smoke, coiling around me like a snake, binding and chaining me to my predator...
"P-p-please," I whisper, my voice trembling and much lower than it used to be, basically a whisper. Tina says it suits my newfound humility. "Please, more..."
"Sure," Tina says with a cruel giggle, pulling deep on her cigarette, dragging the moment on and on, making me linger on the edge of need and despair and sheer rapture.
When at last she blows the smoke into my face, I begin to swoon. The shapes fill my sight, nonsensical and formless in a way, and yet so beautiful and captivating, blowing away my thoughts, my strength. They seem to contain everything.
Everything but Tina's eyes, which float behind the smoke like a pair of magnificent, distant stars.
I breathe it in, this bizarre smoke that drifts from Tina's odd cigarettes. It tastes like sapphic dominance, feels like a pair of feminine thighs wrapping tightly around my head, like a hand twisting my nipples, a proffered foot waiting to be kissed.
I'm beguiled and enthralled. Bewitched and subverted. Captive, and demoted. Deprived of will and pride, autonomy and independence, dignity and self-respect.
And I love every second of it.
"The place runs so much smoother when you're on your knees," Tina says, a dreamy vision of girly ownership amidst a sea of drifting smoke. And she's right, because it does. Admitting it, even just in the privacy of my own mind, makes me twitch with needy arousal, but it's true.
Now that Tina runs this place, her friends come over all the time. Business is booming. Of course, Tina has full control of the registry, so I don't see a penny beyond the exceptionally meagre salary she pays me. Sometimes, she withholds it, for no good reason other than to keep me in line.
I love that I hate that my cunt loves her doing that.
The jocks come here from the bank, or the corporate office, or a construction site to take their coffee break. The Staceys spend entire afternoons gossiping with Tina. Both groups have one thing in common, one which is so humiliating as to rend at what little is left of my self-perception.
They seem completely unperturbed by the fact that Tina, who started out as a waitress, now apparently runs the place, while I, the former owner, the former unpopular girl they thought of as a loser back in high school... I've been demoted to the status of Hooters waitress.