The nanny Diaries

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A/N: Glad to be updating again. Been rewriting like crazy! Hope you guys are enjoying the story.

THE NANNY DIARIES

"Martini, straight up --- no olive." Having steamed Grayer's dinner into an unrecognizable mush, burned my hand in the process, and nearly scalded Grayer several times, then having to dine atop his toilet seat, I am truly ready to "take the edge off."

I shift on the bar stool, wondering if, perhaps I could work for that redhead from Chicago --- move to Illinois, try on investment banking, and spend my days preparing her pb & j.

I reach into my bag for my pay envelope and fish out a twenty for the bartender. It's thicker this week and I count over three hundred in cash.

I realise that while I'm exhausted and probably on my way to some sort of substance abuse problem, the upside of working three times as many hours as I'd agreed to is that I'm making three times as much money.

It's only the second week of the month and the rent is already covered. And there is that pair of black leather pants I've had my eye on . . .

I just need half an hour of guiet before I can go home to Charlene and her hairy pilot boyfriend. I don't want to talk, I don't want to listen, and I most definitely do not want to cook. I mean, good God, having your hairy boyfriend sleep over when you share a studio apartment.

Not okay. Not okay at all. I am counting the days until she's slotted for the Asia route

"Yo, yo, check this out!" The blond homeboy in the Brooks Brothers ensemble motions for his "poses" to check out his Palm Pilot at the corner table. Classic

Normally, I avoid Dorrian's and it's preppy clientele like the clap. But it was directly on my path home and the bartender makes a terrific martini. And I did have to "take my edge off"

Besides, off season is usually pretty safe, once they all return to school.

I count five white baseball hats huddled over their friend's new toy. Despite only being I. College, they all have portable cellular devices of some kind or another hanging off their yuppy utility belts.

The years change, the corduroy jackets of the seventies giving way to the flipped up collars of the eighties, the plaid shirts of the nineties, and the Gore-Tex of the new millennium, but their mentality is as ageless as the red-checked tablecloths.

I am so riveted that I automatically follow their gaze when they turn to the door. In keeping with the tenor of my day, Who should walk in but my very own Harvard Hottie, sans chapeau blanc. And he knows them. Ugh. I take a long swig as the vision I'd been savoring of him healing children in Tibet morphs into one of him in a suit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

"Is that good? You like that?" Oh God, there's one standing right next to me. Roll 'em up, kids, roll 'em up.

"What?" I ask, noting his South Carolina baseball hat, which proudly proclaims COCKS across the front in three-inch crimson letters

"Maaar-tiii-niiis. Pretty hard stuff, don't you think?" he says a little too close to my face and then screams over my head, "Yo! Get off your assets and give me a hand with these drinks, you lazy bitches!" H. H. comes over to assist with the beer transport.

"Hey, Grayer's girlfriend, right?" He smiles broadly.

He remembered! No, bad nanny. Stock exchange, stock exchange. Yet I can't help noting a comparative lack of gadgets adorning his Levi's.

"I'm happy to report that he's out for the count after one reading of Goodnight Moon." I smile back in spite of myself.

"I hope Jones here isn't giving you a hard time." Jones cracks up at the unintended double entendre.