Don't Ask Don't Tell

Chapter 5: Don't take the pawn just yet

What the entire fuck just happened, Suga thought. He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He looked around again, confirming that yes, this was the same office he had walked into not five minutes earlier, and yes, that had just happened. Suga was officially stuck between a rock and a hard place. If he went home, like he wanted to, he would get fired for sure. If he went out on the floor, he'd have to see that fucking creep again.
Suga slid out of the office and shut the door quietly behind him. It would be like he was never there, he told himself. Because he definitely wanted it to be that way. He took in a deep breath and walked out into the locker room. The constant chatter that was characteristic of a stripper's locker room was comforting.
"So, what did Chanyeol want?" Jimin asked, rifling through his locker for something, Suga wasn't sure what.
"I didn't talk to Chanyeol. I talked to Bogum."
Jimin looked at him like that explained everything. He assumed that it did.
"Did it go well?"
"As well as it could have, given the circumstances."
"He's a fucking creep. I'm sorry you had to be forced to associate with him."
Suga nodded and went about getting ready for the night. Jimin didn't ask him about it further, and Suga was fine not telling.
Out on the floor, everything was chaos as usual. Drunk people sure seemed to enjoy fondling underage boys when placed in a room that deemed it acceptable. God, people were disgusting. Suga stood by the bar, since he had some time to spare, and surveyed the crowd. He genuinely enjoyed watching what absolute nonsense went on here sometimes. Suga's eyes tracked over the booth closest to the bar, where, unfortunately, Bogum sat, angrily discussing something in hushed tones with a group of other people that Suga didn't recognize. He could pick out Ruki's name occasionally, but other than that, nothing. Reila was spastically twitching the way she did when she was dancing, and Suga couldn't see the entire table. He wondered what was so important with Ruki that it merited a group discussion with mafia figureheads.
Reila got shoved to the side, and Suga squinted in the red lighting. He felt like he recognized one of the men sitting there with the group. He couldn't tell since he was staring at the side of the man's head and not his face. The man looked across the club, and Suga nearly screeched. It was V.
Didn't he have somewhere to be? Wasn't that what he said when he'd dropped Suga at the door at the beginning of the night?
V must have noticed Suga staring at him across the bar because he got up and headed straight towards him.
"Hey," V said, above the loudness of the club. "I heard what happened with Bogum."
"You did?"
"He was bitching about it ten minutes ago."
"How convenient of him."
"I can talk to him if you want. He shouldn't be doing that, especially not to you."
"Especially not to anyone."
"Right," V said, nodding. Suga sighed.
"I would like for him to leave me alone," Suga said, tilting his head to look at where Bogum was staring daggers into the back of V's head.
"I'll talk to him."
"Thank you."
"Don't mention it. I'm fucking tired of him doing that to people, anyhow."
"I would be too."
V turned to look at the table he'd just come from. "I think I should be going. We were in the middle of a deal, after all."
Suga raised an eyebrow but knew better than to ask.
"Plus," V said, smirking. "Looks like you're next up."
Just as quickly as he'd come over, V was gone. Suga hadn't the time to truly think about it, because V was right about him being next up. The rest of the night went as usual, and Suga was glad to collect his things at the end of the night and leave.

Suga was fucked.
The past three weeks saw a massive drop in patronage. A massive drop in patronage meant a massive drop in his paycheck. And, looking at the crowd tonight, it didn't matter how many dances he did, he wasn't going to make enough tonight. He looked at the pitiful handful of singles in hand. He had a whole ₩8699. That was less than a third of what he usually made. Fuck, it was probably less than a sixteenth. A chorused trail of "fuck"s followed him through the locker room. That absolutely tragic amount of cash paired with a barely minimum wage job did not spell "good" for him. He wasn't going to be able to cover expenses for the week, and he had barely been able to afford the rent payment yesterday. He wasn't proud to admit it, but he had dipped into the amount he normally reserved for Jihoon's college fund to pay the bills. What the hell was he going to do? Taking another job was out of the question. He didn't have the time to work two jobs and go to school. He already spent all of his free time studying, and he couldn't lose his honour roll with distinction title. Not if he wanted to go to college himself. And it wasn't like his mom would be finding a stable job. She'd gotten hired and fired at three different ones in the last two weeks. His mother finding a stable job was about as likely to happen as Suga finding a fucking unicorn at this point.
Suga sighed deeply. He was fucked. And he knew it.
He had to think. As much of a disgusting creep as he was, Bogum had money. And a lot of it. And Suga needed a pay raise. Would he get a pay raise if he fucked one of his boss's underlings? Suga had to think on that one. Wasn't that what Reila had done, and didn't she get her drugs massively discounted because of it? There were monetary benefits to whoring yourself out.
But was Suga really willing to go that far? He wasn't sure.
Suga worried on the walk to the metro station to go home that night, and he worried while a plethora of people in a better situation than he was stared at him in complete terse silence. For once, he didn't think about the hundreds of pairs of eyes on him and his worn clothing, nor was he thinking about the layers of sheetrock above, the dank brickwork wrapping around the train in the dark. If Suga didn't come up with ₩350 000 in two days, Heechul would most likely rat him out to his mother. It was so petty that he had to pay Heechul not to tell his mother that her son worked in a strip club. Heechul was petty, though. Suga had learned to live with him skimming cash off the top of his paycheck, even if he didn't like it very much at all. God, Heechul was an ass. Suga sighed deeply, not caring about the looks he got from his fellow commuters. He needed to think.